“Alas, madame, I have just made a very arduous journey — — , undertaken solely on your account.”
“Sir!”
“Oh! it is on behalf of one who calls you Juliette that I am come,” I continued. Her face grew white.
“You will not see him to-day.”
“Is he ill?” she asked, and her voice sank lower.
“Yes. But for pity’s sake, control yourself.... He intrusted me with secrets that concern you, and you may be sure that never messenger could be more discreet nor more devoted than I.”
“What is the matter with him?”
“How if he loved you no longer?”
“Oh! that is impossible!” she cried, and a faint smile, nothing less than frank, broke over her face. Then all at once a kind of shudder ran through her, and she reddened, and she gave me a wild, swift glance as she asked:
“Is he alive?”
Great God! What a terrible phrase! I was too young to bear that tone in her voice; I made no reply, only looked at the unhappy woman in helpless bewilderment.
“Monsieur, monsieur, give me an answer!” she cried.
“Yes, madame.”
“Is it true? Oh! tell me the truth; I can hear the truth. Tell me the truth! Any pain would be less keen than this suspense.”
I answered by two tears wrung from me by that strange tone of hers. She leaned against a tree with a faint, sharp cry.
“Madame, here comes your husband!”
“Have I a husband?” and with those words she fled away out of sight.
“Well,” cried the Count, “dinner is growing cold. — Come, monsieur.”
Thereupon I followed the master of the house into the dining-room. Dinner was served with all the luxury which we have learned to expect in Paris. There were five covers laid, three for the Count and Countess and their little daughter; my own, which should have been HIS; and another for the canon of Saint-Denis, who said grace, and then asked:
“Why, where can our dear Countess be?”
“Oh! she will be here directly,” said the Count. He had hastily helped us to the soup, and was dispatching an ample plateful with portentous speed.
“Oh! nephew,” exclaimed the canon, “if your wife were here, you would behave more rationally.”
“Papa will make himself ill!” said the child with a mischievous look.
Just after this extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with, “We cannot find madame anywhere, sir!”
I sprang up at the words with a dread in my mind, my fears written so plainly in my face, that the old canon came out after me into the garden. The Count, for the sake of appearances, came as far as the threshold.
“Don’t go, don’t go!” called he. “Don’t trouble yourselves in the least,” but he did not offer to accompany us.
We three — the canon, the housemaid, and I — hurried through the garden walks and over the bowling-green in the park, shouting, listening for an answer, growing more uneasy every moment. As we hurried along, I told the story of the fatal accident, and discovered how strongly the maid was attached to her mistress, for she took my secret dread far more seriously than the canon. We went along by the pools of water; all over the park we went; but we neither found the Countess nor any sign that she had passed that way. At last we turned back, and under the walls of some outbuildings I heard a smothered, wailing cry, so stifled that it was scarcely audible. The sound seemed to come from a place that might have been a granary. I went in at all risks, and there we found Juliette. With the instinct of despair, she had buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden those dreadful cries — pudency even stronger than grief. She was sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant, more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The maid could find nothing to say but “There! madame; there, there — — ”
“What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?” the old canon kept on exclaiming.
At last, with the girl’s help, I carried Juliette to her room, gave orders that she was not to be disturbed, and that every one must be told that the Countess was suffering from a sick headache. Then we came down to the dining-room, the canon and I.
Some little time had passed since we left the dinner-table; I had scarcely given a thought to the Count since we left him under the peristyle; his indifference had surprised me, but my amazement increased when we came back and found him seated philosophically at table. He had eaten pretty nearly all the dinner, to the huge delight of his little daughter; the child was smiling at her father’s flagrant infraction of the Countess’ rules. The man’s odd indifference was explained to me by a mild altercation which at once arose with the canon. The Count was suffering from some serious complaint. I cannot remember now what it was, but his medical advisers had put him on a very severe regimen, and the ferocious hunger familiar to convalescents, sheer animal appetite, had overpowered all human sensibilities. In that little space I had seen frank and undisguised human nature under two very different aspects, in such a sort that there was a certain grotesque element in the very midst of a most terrible tragedy.
The evening that followed was dreary. I was tired. The canon racked his brains to discover a reason for his niece’s tears. The lady’s husband silently digested his dinner; content, apparently, with the Countess’ rather vague explanation, sent through the maid, putting forward some feminine ailment as her excuse. We all went early to bed.
As I passed the door of the Countess’ room on the way to my night’s lodging, I asked the servant timidly for news of her. She heard my voice, and would have me come in, and tried to talk, but in vain — she could not utter a sound. She bent her head, and I withdrew. In spite of the painful agitation, which I had felt to the full as youth can feel, I fell asleep, tired out with my forced march.
It was late in the night when I was awakened by the grating sound of curtain rings drawn sharply over the metal rods. There sat the Countess at the foot of my bed. The light from a lamp set on my table fell full upon her face.
“Is it really true, monsieur, quite true?” she asked. “I do not know how I can live after that awful blow which struck me down a little while since; but just now I feel calm. I want to know everything.”
“What calm!” I said to myself as I saw the ghastly pallor of her face contrasting with her brown hair, and heard the guttural tones of her voice. The havoc wrought in her drawn features filled me with dumb amazement.
Those few hours had bleached her; she had lost a woman’s last glow of autumn color. Her eyes were red and swollen, nothing of their beauty remained, nothing looked out of them save her bitter and exceeding grief; it was as if a gray cloud covered the place through which the sun had shone.
I gave her the story of the accident in a few words, without laying too much stress on some too harrowing details. I told her about our first day’s journey, and how it had been filled with recollections of her and of love. And she listened eagerly, without shedding a tear, leaning her face towards me, as some zealous doctor might lean to watch any change in a patient’s face. When she seemed to me to have opened her whole heart to pain, to be deliberately plunging herself into misery with the first delirious frenzy of despair, I caught at my opportunity, and told her of the fears that troubled the poor dying man, told her how and why it was that he had given me this fatal message. Then her tears were dried by the fires that burned in the dark depths within her. She grew even paler. When I drew the letters from beneath my pillow and held them out to her, she took them mechanically; then, trembling from head to foot, she said in a hollow voice:
“And I burned all his letters! — I have nothing of him left! — Nothing! nothing!”
She struck her hand against her forehead.
“Madame — — ” I began.
She glanced a
t me in the convulsion of grief.
“I cut this from his head, this lock of his hair.”
And I gave her that last imperishable token that had been a very part of him she loved. Ah! if you had felt, as I felt then, her burning tears falling on your hands, you would know what gratitude is, when it follows so closely upon the benefit. Her eyes shone with a feverish glitter, a faint ray of happiness gleamed out of her terrible suffering, as she grasped my hands in hers, and said, in a choking voice:
“Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you love.”
She broke off, and fled away with her treasure.
Next morning, this night-scene among my dreams seemed like a dream; to make sure of the piteous truth, I was obliged to look fruitlessly under my pillow for the packet of letters. There is no need to tell you how the next day went. I spent several hours of it with the Juliette whom my poor comrade had so praised to me. In her lightest words, her gestures, in all that she did and said, I saw proofs of the nobleness of soul, the delicacy of feeling which made her what she was, one of those beloved, loving, and self-sacrificing natures so rarely found upon this earth.
In the evening the Comte de Montpersan came himself as far as Moulins with me. There he spoke with a kind of embarrassment:
“Monsieur, if it is not abusing your good-nature, and acting very inconsiderately towards a stranger to whom we are already under obligations, would you have the goodness, as you are going to Paris, to remit a sum of money to M. de — — (I forget the name), in the Rue du Sentier; I owe him an amount, and he asked me to send it as soon as possible.”
“Willingly,” said I. And in the innocence of my heart, I took charge of a rouleau of twenty-five louis d’or, which paid the expenses of my journey back to Paris; and only when, on my arrival, I went to the address indicated to repay the amount to M. de Montpersan’s correspondent, did I understand the ingenious delicacy with which Juliette had obliged me. Was not all the genius of a loving woman revealed in such a way of lending, in her reticence with regard to a poverty easily guessed?
And what rapture to have this adventure to tell to a woman who clung to you more closely in dread, saying, “Oh, my dear, not you! You must not die!”
THE GRAND BRETECHE
Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
This short story was originally published in 1831 in Balzac’s collection Contes Bruns. The tale begins at the same dinner party as Another Study of Woman, with Dr Bianchon agreeing to tell one of his ‘appalling’ stories to entertain the other guests. The evening has grown late and it seems an apt time, he says, for this particular story. In contrast to Another Study of Woman Bianchon is the only narrator, and he is uninterrupted throughout the tale. It begins in a ruined château outside Vendome, where Bianchon was staying while attending a rich patient. He portrays himself as a rather romantic person, who liked to enter the estate through gaps in the walls and remain there in contemplation. But it is his discovery of a secret garden which provides the mystery of this tale.
An original illustration
LA GRANDE BRETECHE
“Ah! madame,” replied the doctor, “I have some appalling stories in my collection. But each one has its proper hour in a conversation — you know the pretty jest recorded by Chamfort, and said to the Duc de Fronsac: ‘Between your sally and the present moment lie ten bottles of champagne.’”
“But it is two in the morning, and the story of Rosina has prepared us,” said the mistress of the house.
“Tell us, Monsieur Bianchon!” was the cry on every side.
The obliging doctor bowed, and silence reigned.
“At about a hundred paces from Vendome, on the banks of the Loir,” said he, “stands an old brown house, crowned with very high roofs, and so completely isolated that there is nothing near it, not even a fetid tannery or a squalid tavern, such as are commonly seen outside small towns. In front of this house is a garden down to the river, where the box shrubs, formerly clipped close to edge the walks, now straggle at their own will. A few willows, rooted in the stream, have grown up quickly like an enclosing fence, and half hide the house. The wild plants we call weeds have clothed the bank with their beautiful luxuriance. The fruit-trees, neglected for these ten years past, no longer bear a crop, and their suckers have formed a thicket. The espaliers are like a copse. The paths, once graveled, are overgrown with purslane; but, to be accurate there is no trace of a path.
“Looking down from the hilltop, to which cling the ruins of the old castle of the Dukes of Vendome, the only spot whence the eye can see into this enclosure, we think that at a time, difficult now to determine, this spot of earth must have been the joy of some country gentleman devoted to roses and tulips, in a word, to horticulture, but above all a lover of choice fruit. An arbor is visible, or rather the wreck of an arbor, and under it a table still stands not entirely destroyed by time. At the aspect of this garden that is no more, the negative joys of the peaceful life of the provinces may be divined as we divine the history of a worthy tradesman when we read the epitaph on his tomb. To complete the mournful and tender impressions which seize the soul, on one of the walls there is a sundial graced with this homely Christian motto, ‘Ultimam cogita.’
“The roof of this house is dreadfully dilapidated; the outside shutters are always closed; the balconies are hung with swallows’ nests; the doors are for ever shut. Straggling grasses have outlined the flagstones of the steps with green; the ironwork is rusty. Moon and sun, winter, summer, and snow have eaten into the wood, warped the boards, peeled off the paint. The dreary silence is broken only by birds and cats, polecats, rats, and mice, free to scamper round, and fight, and eat each other. An invisible hand has written over it all: ‘Mystery.’
“If, prompted by curiosity, you go to look at this house from the street, you will see a large gate, with a round-arched top; the children have made many holes in it. I learned later that this door had been blocked for ten years. Through these irregular breaches you will see that the side towards the courtyard is in perfect harmony with the side towards the garden. The same ruin prevails. Tufts of weeds outline the paving-stones; the walls are scored by enormous cracks, and the blackened coping is laced with a thousand festoons of pellitory. The stone steps are disjointed; the bell-cord is rotten; the gutter-spouts broken. What fire from heaven could have fallen there? By what decree has salt been sown on this dwelling? Has God been mocked here? Or was France betrayed? These are the questions we ask ourselves. Reptiles crawl over it, but give no reply. This empty and deserted house is a vast enigma of which the answer is known to none.
“It was formerly a little domain, held in fief, and is known as La Grande Breteche. During my stay at Vendome, where Despleins had left me in charge of a rich patient, the sight of this strange dwelling became one of my keenest pleasures. Was it not far better than a ruin? Certain memories of indisputable authenticity attach themselves to a ruin; but this house, still standing, though being slowly destroyed by an avenging hand, contained a secret, an unrevealed thought. At the very least, it testified to a caprice. More than once in the evening I boarded the hedge, run wild, which surrounded the enclosure. I braved scratches, I got into this ownerless garden, this plot which was no longer public or private; I lingered there for hours gazing at the disorder. I would not, as the price of the story to which this strange scene no doubt was due, have asked a single question of any gossiping native. On that spot I wove delightful romances, and abandoned myself to little debauches of melancholy which enchanted me. If I had known the reason — perhaps quite commonplace — of this neglect, I should have lost the unwritten poetry which intoxicated me. To me this refuge represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who speak in the language of epitaphs; one day I saw in it the home of lepers; another, the house of the Atridae; but, above all, I found there provincial life, with its contemplative ideas, its hour-glass existence. I of
ten wept there, I never laughed.
“More than once I felt involuntary terrors as I heard overhead the dull hum of the wings of some hurrying wood-pigeon. The earth is dank; you must be on the watch for lizards, vipers, and frogs, wandering about with the wild freedom of nature; above all, you must have no fear of cold, for in a few moments you feel an icy cloak settle on your shoulders, like the Commendatore’s hand on Don Giovanni’s neck.
“One evening I felt a shudder; the wind had turned an old rusty weathercock, and the creaking sounded like a cry from the house, at the very moment when I was finishing a gloomy drama to account for this monumental embodiment of woe. I returned to my inn, lost in gloomy thoughts. When I had supped, the hostess came into my room with an air of mystery, and said, ‘Monsieur, here is Monsieur Regnault.’
“‘Who is Monsieur Regnault?’
“‘What, sir, do you not know Monsieur Regnault? — Well, that’s odd,’ said she, leaving the room.
“On a sudden I saw a man appear, tall, slim, dressed in black, hat in hand, who came in like a ram ready to butt his opponent, showing a receding forehead, a small pointed head, and a colorless face of the hue of a glass of dirty water. You would have taken him for an usher. The stranger wore an old coat, much worn at the seams; but he had a diamond in his shirt frill, and gold rings in his ears.
“‘Monsieur,’ said I, ‘whom have I the honor of addressing?’ — He took a chair, placed himself in front of my fire, put his hat on my table, and answered while he rubbed his hands: ‘Dear me, it is very cold. — Monsieur, I am Monsieur Regnault.’
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 146